Power and cooling are emerging to be key challenges in data center environments. A recent International Data Corporation (IDC) report estimated the worldwide spending on enterprise power and cooling to be more than $30 billion and likely to even surpass spending on new server hardware in the near future. Furthermore, many data centers are reporting millions of dollars of spending on electricity costs for annual usage.
While there has been a lot of progress made on this problem, one of the key challenges is that the conventional solutions only address individual aspects of the problem in isolation. For example, one solution may try to reduce power consumption at the processor level, for example, through voltage and frequency scaling. Another solution implemented at the software level for virtual machines (VMs) is to consolidate workloads and power down unused hosts to reduce power consumption when demand is low. These solutions are not coordinated. In the absence of coordination between these various solutions, they are likely to interfere with one another in unpredictable and potentially dangerous ways, and without coordination, the solutions operate less efficiently.